The tooling right now is pretty much directly exposing the underlying netlink api, so can seem a little clunky. wg-quick does go someway to making it more userfriendly.

WireGuard has been very pro-active at adopting useful abstractions, personally I've used https://github.com/WireGuard/wgctrl-go to build https://github.com/jamescun/wg-api a JSONRPC server for WireGuard, so expect tooling to improve over time.

I think that people are looking for Wireguard to be something that it isn't. It's a fancy Ethernet cable, that's all. You can build a lot of neat things on top of Ethernet cables, like full networks. But it's not the cable that builds the network, it's just a low-level tool for facilitating that construction.

If you want to do something like make a point-to-point VPN, then wg-quick is that layer on top. If you want to build a mesh network from endpoints authenticated with a third-party identity provider, you want something like Tailscale. Wireguard is just a low-level building block that handles the crypto in those use cases; making something high-level is left as an exercise to the reader.

I felt the same so I made https://github.com/naggie/dsnet -- just a simple CLI tool to add/remove peers, generating config.

Depends on what you are doing. For my use cases I strongly preferred the wireguard tooling to the OpenVPN tooling, but the Wireguard ecosystem is still missing many features.

I guess so. But at the same time. After setting it up to connect into my home network, I'm just surprised at how well it works.

You can use networkd to make it easier, if you like using systemd that is.